1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is generally related to wireless communications and more particularly related to multi-hop wireless network communications over high bandwidth ultra-wide band (“UWB”) wireless communication channels.
2. Related Art
In recent times, UWB technology has gone through significant progress. Many different competing proposals for UWB networking have been consolidated into two major camps. The first proposal falls under the WiMedia umbrella and the second proposal falls under the UWB Forum umbrella. UWB communication technologies hold the promise of high speed transmission rates over short distances. However, to geographically extend the coverage of UWB networks without compromising the high speed transmission rates, multi-hop wireless network communications are needed.
Conventional UWB implementations employ a medium access control (“MAC”) protocol, for example the IEEE 802.15.3 MAC or the WiMedia MAC (including the multi-band OFDM alliance (“MBOA”) MAC) that can be used under the UWB Forum umbrella or the WiMedia umbrella. However, a significant drawback of these conventional solutions for UWB communications is that they lack scalability in a multi-hop network communication environment.
Furthermore, multi-hop wireless network communications over mesh networks have significant challenges with respect to reservation based wireless mesh networking for time division multiple access (“TDMA”), code division multiple access (“CDMA”), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (“OFDM”) and their hybridization with carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (“CSMA/CA”) schemes in single channel or multiple channel environments. Some of these challenges include the need for routing and resource allocation to be together, which significantly complicates these aspects. The routing process needs to find a path with a load balancing and quality of service (“QoS”) guarantee while the resource allocation process depends on how real time traffic flows are distributed within the mesh network.
Additionally, conventional techniques suffer from instability in the direct links between two nodes due to variable transmission rates and multi-hop networking as well as low throughput due to the larger interference range of direct links. Even further complicating matters are the challenges associated with configuring internet protocol (“IP”) addresses for these multi-hop wireless network communications over mesh networks. Therefore, what is needed is a system and method that overcomes these significant problems found in the conventional systems as described above.